SoundSpike Reviews

Concert: Daughtry in Phoenix

2012-05-22T16:28:05-08:00

It's been six years since Chris Daughtry's rein on "American Idol" was unceremoniously cut short. He took fourth place yet went on to open for the likes of Bon Jovi and play venues of just about every size.
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Album: Gaz Coombes, "Here Come the Bombs" (Hot Fruit Records)

2012-05-22T06:29:23-08:00

Gaz Coombes started out a precocious brat and still seems mildly immature, despite a suspicious physical tilt toward actual middle age. Maybe it's the sideburns. But Coombes' musical chops were never anything less than full-grown, even when he looked like a kid borrowing his big brother's guitar.
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Concert: Rammstein in Anaheim, CA

2012-05-20T11:36:03-08:00

Imagine a Technicolor Leni Riefenstahl film shot on a Ridley Scott "Aliens"-inspired set with a Wagnerian metal soundtrack on a stage hotter than the surface of the sun. Yes, Rammstein is Beavis' wet dream come to life. Surely there was a pyromaniac furiously gratifying himself somewhere amongst the 15,000 sweaty bodies at Anaheim's Honda Center Thursday (5/17) evening.
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Album: Willie Nelson, "Heroes" (Sony Legacy)

2012-05-18T19:32:22-08:00

Throughout a long and extremely weird career (really one of the greatest shaggy dog stories the popular music industry has ever produced, and there's very little even comes close in terms of audaciousness times longevity divided by quality), Willie Hugh Nelson has maintained a certain level of familiarity with his audience merely by doing the things nobody expects a country star should do. Rolling with rappers, rapping about marijuana, speaking out against authority figures -- he's essentially an older Kid Rock, with gravitas, and the mirror image of the polished citybilly you're most likely to see stalking the stage of the Grand Ole Opry these days.
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Album: Beach House, "Bloom" (Sub Pop)

2012-05-16T07:09:38-08:00

Beach House, which has essentially been making the same record for the last eight years, ever since emerging from its heavily fortified bedroom bunker in Baltimore, has made the best version ever of its same old album. It doesn't take much time around these guys to suss out that this slow, relentless crawl toward perfection is all part of the bigger plan, a sort of magic act that the duo has been polishing for years and which now works so well that even close-up inspection cannot reveal the sleight-of-hand.
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Concert: Beach Boys 50th Anniversary Tour in Uncasville, CT

2012-05-14T16:11:45-08:00

Coming of age as a music lover in the 1970s presented an opportunity for many to get to know the sounds of their favorite bands intimately. And if you were partial to using the newest generation headphones to capture the sonic details of complicated arrangements, few acts made for better listening than The Beach Boys.
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Album: Silversun Pickups, "Neck of the Woods" (Dangerbird)

2012-05-11T16:40:22-08:00

There's a house on the cover of Silversun Pickups' "Neck of the Woods" that could be anywhere for all of its androgynous, indeterminate Americana. The lights are on behind muted shades, the paint is chipping. It's dusk, or early morning. It could be anywhere. You get closer and suddenly it seems very obvious: something terrible is happening inside.
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Album: Damon Albarn, "Dr Dee" (Parlophone)

2012-05-09T05:52:01-08:00

There was a time (for some perhaps, that time was yesterday) when the notion of Damon Albarn creating an actual opera would provoke chortles and guffaws, if not terrified looks and bloody marks on the wall from trying to escape a windowless room via the puny leverage of fingernails.
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Concert: Los Lobos, X and Mariachi El Bronx in Los Angeles

2012-05-07T13:46:58-08:00

After three weekends of festivals in the Southern California desert -- two Coachellas and Stagecoach -- Los Lobos and their friends treated Los Angelenos to a Cinco de Mayo fiesta Saturday night (5/5) at the Greek Theatre that didn't require local music fans to leave the city limits.
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Album: The Brian Jonestown Massacre, "Aufheben" (A Records)

2012-05-07T07:08:17-08:00

It's been years since anything approached "normal" for The Brian Jonestown Massacre, a band that has always excelled at taking upside down and making it look rightside up; the opposite is also exactly true.
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